Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

  Any comment on either sister’s clothes was followed by the refrain, ‘But everyone’s wearing these now, Mum!’

  And, being infatuated with her cool, older sister, Lily now wanted to paint her nails blue and had begun shrugging off any type of hug.

  The only thing Beth and Lily tried to hug with any regularity was the family cat, Fluffikins, who was not a touchy-feely animal and protested loudly at being picked up and dragged out of rooms after rows. Cassie thought the cat might possibly go deaf, what with all the slamming doors he was exposed to.

  ‘It’s a phase; the girls will grow out of it,’ Grammy Pearl said whenever they discussed it. ‘You did.’

  ‘Please tell me I wasn’t that bad or that hormonally difficult,’ Cassie begged her grandmother.

  ‘The times were different and you were different,’ Grammy said diplomatically. ‘You had a lot of hard things to deal with, Cassie. Teenage girls need to fight with their mothers and you didn’t have one. You only had me. I’m not easy to argue with – having your Great-Aunt Edie as a sister had taught me how to avoid arguments, because Edie could start one in an empty room.’

  Grammy Pearl mentioning Cassie’s lack of a mother was the closest they ever came to discussing the great pain of the Keneally family – how Cassie and her younger sister Coco’s mother had left them when Cassie was seven years old and Coco had just turned one. How the pain had eventually killed their father ten years ago, destroyed by grief.

  Jim Keneally had floated on the edges of the all-women household in Delaney Gardens, letting his mother sort out arguments and sign school letters. When Cassie thought of her father, she could see him bent with his head in a book, retreating from life because it hurt too much.

  There had been happiness and love too – Pearl had made sure of that. But their family had never been the sort of normal family Cassie used to dream about – the ones in books or the ones her school friends had. Like a child peering in at a happy family at Christmastime, Cassie often felt that she’d spent much of her childhood peering through the glass windows at the homes of happy families she knew, watching as people made jokes and giggled, as mothers dropped kisses on father’s heads, as fathers were teased for hopeless anniversary bouquets for their wives.

  Despite the happiness in hers and Coco’s childhood, they were different from their peers. Motherless.

  That had made Cassie utterly determined to create the perfect family with Shay and her daughters, to make up for the one she’d never quite had. Her daughters would never be the ones with their faces pressed up against the glass windows, peeping in.

  Except lately, it had all fallen apart.

  ‘One day they’ll come around and they’ll be hugging you, saying you’re the best mum ever,’ Grammy said. ‘Mark my words, it’ll happen.’

  ‘Any date in mind for this miraculous event?’ Cassie asked, laughing without mirth. ‘I want to mark it off in my diary and then see if I can get tranquillisers to keep me going until it happens.’

  Worse was her marriage, because the most united thing she and Shay did now was to discuss their daughters and have rows about belly rings, clothes and unsuitable videos on YouTube, where male singers sang about sex and barely dressed girls who got called ‘hos’ danced around them.

  She and Shay never scheduled the apparently vitally important ‘date nights’. Without date nights, your marriage was as dead as a dodo, and their version of a date night were nights when both she and Shay were too tired to cook – he really did his best to help, although he wasn’t a natural chef – and they got a takeaway with which the whole family slumped in front of the TV and hostilities were temporarily suspended.

  Did that qualify as date night? Nobody fighting? Surely there was kudos for that?

  Besides, if Cassie felt the spark had gone out of their marriage, then wasn’t that what happened to people with kids and busy lives, stuck on the mortgage hamster wheel, endlessly trying to make it all fit together? Shay worked in an engineering firm and these days – thankfully – he was as busy as she was.

  Time was what they needed, and one day they’d get it. Well, they might if only Shay’s mother, Antoinette, let them.

  Cassie, who had no real mother, had married a man who was joined at the hip to his. There were three people in their marriage, as the Princess of Wales had once said.

  Three years ago, Shay’s father had died, and since then his mother had permanently attached herself to Shay like a barnacle to a whale. She rang constantly, asking Shay to come fix plugs, change light bulbs and open the jammed washing machine door.

  ‘I wouldn’t ask him to fix those things,’ Cassie said in outrage to Coco.

  ‘She’s grieving,’ said her sister, always the peacemaker. ‘She’ll get it out of her system. Remember that sweet lady who used to come into the shop all the time when her husband died, in every second day, always with some little trinket? She could have brought it all in in one fell swoop to sell but she wanted the company. It’s like that. Then she got involved with the bingo crowd and now I never see her. She just needed to find her place in the world again.’

  ‘It’s not like that with Antoinette,’ said Cassie, sighing. ‘It’s like she wants a replacement husband.’

  ‘Don’t be freaky,’ said Coco, laughing.

  Then Cassie had laughed and said she wasn’t being freaky, but honestly, Antoinette lived forty-five minutes away: it wasn’t as if she was around the corner. She had two daughters into the bargain, and ‘Could she not learn to change a plug herself?’

  ‘She will,’ soothed Coco. ‘She’ll adjust and find a new life.’

  Except Antoinette hadn’t. Three years on and Shay still drove to his mother’s house like a good little boy whenever she phoned.

  Cassie had explained to Shay that he was spending a lot of time in his mother’s house and might it not be a better plan to talk to his sisters, Miriam and Ruth, and say that they could all club together to afford handymen to help her do the odd jobs, and perhaps to share visiting her all the time?

  ‘Oh, Cass, she needs me now my father’s gone. Don’t you understand that?’ Shay had said crossly when she’d made this suggestion, so that Cassie had felt as if she was being selfish and horrible by wanting her husband to spend some time around their house at the weekend.

  Worse, what Cassie couldn’t say to her sister – because it sounded stupid and melodramatic – was that she didn’t feel loved when Shay put his mother first every time. He kept choosing his mother over his wife.

  Cassie had been too scarred by this happening when she was seven to want it to ever happen again. But how could she say this? It would sound ludicrous and childish.

  Antoinette was older and alone; she needed Shay more.

  Cassie tried so very hard to adjust to this and yet everything in her life was shifting. She’d relied on Shay to be the one constant in this teenage maelstrom but even he had shifted off course and was dedicating himself to his mother. Cassie was supposed to not be even vaguely upset by any of this. She was ‘good old Cassie’ who kept the home fires burning and required no love or affection at all.

  Cassie could tell nobody, but this withdrawal of Shay’s presence – and, to Cassie’s mind, his love – was the most frightening thing of all.

  The Starbucks queue shuffled forwards and Cassie let her attention wander to scan the customers, eyes paying particular attention to women in their late fifties and sixties. She’d been doing it for so many years that she didn’t notice she was doing it: always looking.

  The woman she was looking for could be dead now for all Cassie knew. She might live somewhere else entirely; she might be living on a street dressed in blankets and begging for a few coins so she could buy something more to drink. Or would she have moved on to harder stuff? Heroin? Meth? Wasn’t that what happened to women like her mother?

  Who knew?

 
Thirty years since she’d last seen her, yet Cassie couldn’t stop herself looking out for her mother. Despite the fact that she’d told everyone – Coco, their father, their grandmother, her husband, her friends – that she’d long since got used to the fact that her mother was a loser and had abandoned her without a second thought, Cassie still looked. And hoped.

  She had no idea what she’d say to Marguerite – she would never call her mother or mum – but she was sure she’d know what to say if the chance ever came.

  Why did you leave? Why did you never come back? Was it my fault? Was I not lovable enough?

  The voice in her head when she spoke those words was never that of the always calm, mature Cassie Reynolds, née Keneally; it was the voice of a heartbroken seven-year-old who’d never forgotten the day she’d come home from school to hear that her mother had just left.

  Her father had picked her up from school, not Grammy or Rita from next door, who did it when Mum couldn’t. Dad never picked her up. It was always Mum, except the day before they’d had the crash. Maybe Mum was upset about it, even though she’d laughed at the time and said it was all fine. Just a teeny little mistake.

  Mum liked to do fun things when she came. She’d have Coco all bundled up in her car seat and she’d have a plan.

  ‘Let’s go to the cafe for tea and buns!’ she’d say, looking all shiny and pretty with her hair curled and her woolly coat – Mum said it was fake fur and she looked like a snuggly and glamorous bear, Cassie thought, with it wrapped around her.

  Mum never talked much to the other mums.

  ‘They’re boring,’ she’d whisper to Cassie, except Mum didn’t whisper quietly enough and people heard her.

  Cassie knew she should feel bad at the stares people gave them, but Mum didn’t care. She shook her streaky dark hair and beamed back at everyone.

  In the car, Cassie got to pick what music to play and they’d sing along loudly as they sped down the road, laughing and talking. Mum’s perfume was everywhere in the car: flowers, spices and something else Cassie didn’t recognise, something uniquely Mum.

  She loved her mum more than anyone else in the world but sometimes, only sometimes, late at night, Mum got angry and shouted. Her voice sounded funny too, not like Mum at all. Cassie had heard her, heard Dad shouting back, heard Coco’s cry as she woke up.

  Those nights gave her a pain in her tummy and she had it now when she saw Dad waiting for her at the school gates with all the mothers. He looked sick, sort of pale, like he might fall over if he wasn’t leaning on the gate pillar.

  He took her hand in his and led her over to the car, with the big dent in it where Mum had banged it.

  ‘Only a teeny bang,’ Mum had said happily.

  ‘Teeny,’ Cassie had agreed, giggling.

  ‘We could cover over where the paint came off with nail varnish! Pink or red?’

  Cassie had giggled some more. The car was pale blue. Pink bits would be so funny – a special car, for a special mum.

  As she got into the car, Cassie didn’t ask Dad why he was there. Coco wasn’t in the back seat. She was at Grammy’s, Dad said. It was the only thing he said on the whole journey. His hands were really shaky the way Mum’s sometimes were – ‘Silly Mummy with her shaky hands!’ – and Cassie didn’t ask why they were driving to Grammy Pearl’s house with the pretty green and the old tree in front instead of to their home around the corner.

  Grammy was at the door, reassuringly normal and calm, and she hugged Cassie and said she had made butterfly cakes. ‘Your favourite. I had to stop Basil and Sybil from nibbling them all,’ she added, as the pugs, both black and shiny with fat pink tongues, panted up to Cassie for kisses and licks.

  On the ground, encircled by soft fur, squashy bellies and adoring dogs, Cassie felt a moment of safety. Grammy would tell her what was going on. Grammy had been the one who’d said Mum and Coco had to stay in hospital for a bit when Coco was a teeny baby and had been sick. Grammy was good at minding her when things went wrong.

  But Grammy said nothing all day. Not when Cassie was doing her homework, not when they were watching Scooby Doo and Coco was asleep in her carrycot. Not that evening when Grammy brought Cassie up to the spare bedroom that was decorated in sunflower yellows and had all Cassie’s things magically in it – her teddies, her nightlight, her jammies with the rabbit on the front, and her books.

  Cassie had to ask.

  ‘Where’s Mum?’ she said in her quietest voice, so Coco wouldn’t hear. She didn’t want Coco to get upset, even though she was a baby and everything. She might get upset and cry again. Coco was special because she’d been so sick and Mum called her ‘my little angel’. Cassie felt a powerful need inside her to take care of Coco. She was the big sister, after all.

  Grammy muttered that the pillowcase looked unironed and went to find a new one. She didn’t look at Cassie as she changed it. ‘There, all nice and ironed now.’ She paused. ‘Your mum isn’t well, Cassie, and she had to go away to get better.’

  ‘Go away? Without me and Coco?’

  The pain in her tummy had never felt this bad: it was like something ripping her tummy into two bits, carving a hole the way the people on the television had carved a pumpkin once for Hallowe’en to show how it was done.

  Grammy Pearl sat heavily on the bed.

  ‘It’s the best thing, Cassie.’

  ‘No,’ wailed Cassie, not caring about the noise. ‘It’s not the best thing! I need her. Coco needs her. Somebody made her go! She was kidnapped! She wouldn’t go, she loves us!’

  Grammy Pearl hauled Cassie on to her lap and held her like she was a baby.

  ‘Of course she loves you; that’s why she went. Because she’s not well and she wants to be a better mum to you both.’

  ‘She’s the best mum!’

  ‘I know, I know,’ crooned Pearl as Cassie sobbed. ‘It’s the best thing, really. I promise.’

  A day had gone by and Mum hadn’t come home, hadn’t even phoned. Then another day. Then a week.

  Grammy said Mum would come home but Dad hadn’t. Once, only once, he’d stared at Cassie with those sad eyes and had told her the worst thing in the whole world: ‘Your mother doesn’t want us anymore, Cass – that’s the truth of it. She’s not coming home. We can be happy without her, can’t we?’

  He’d hugged her then and Cassie had been afraid to cry, afraid to say ‘Noooo’, afraid to do anything but hug her father back and pretend that everything was fine, like there wasn’t this hole in her life.

  Eventually nobody even talked about Mum anymore. The photo of Mum and Dad on their wedding day disappeared but Cassie found it in Dad’s room, hidden on his dressing table behind a school one of her in her grey pinafore.

  She began to worry about baby Coco. What if she went too? So Cassie decided that she would never allow that to happen. Coco was her sister and if they took her, they’d have to take Cassie too. Coco was hers to mind, whatever happened. Nobody would ever hurt her or take her away.

  A skinny double-shot cappuccino in one hand, Cassie entered Larousse Events via the revolving door and made her way to the lifts, drinking some of her coffee, hoping it would work its magic. She’d been awake in the middle of the night due to thirteen-year-old Lily having a nightmare, and Cassie had ended up spending an hour in her younger daughter’s bed, hugging her until the night terror was over.

  ‘There are no monsters, honey,’ she’d said, holding Lily tightly until the shaking stopped. ‘Mummy’s here with you; you’re safe, Lily.’

  The holding always worked. Like swaddling an infant, Cassie thought. It had taken a while to work out what seemed to calm Lily.

  ‘I used to put a cool cloth on your arms and legs and the cold gently took you out of it without really waking you up,’ Grammy Pearl had explained when Lily first started the nightmares.

  Nightmares in children could be gen
etic but Cassie couldn’t remember having them until her mother had left. Maybe she was wrong. Her memory of those days was hazy now. She didn’t remember what from that time was the truth anymore.

  But she knew one thing for certain: she couldn’t imagine what would ever make her leave her children.

  There had to have been something wrong with her mother, hadn’t there? Not just the addiction. That’s what Pearl had finally, grudgingly, told her about when Cassie had begged to know – the drinking and the drunk driving. There had to be something more. Because any mother who really loved her kids would sober up and come home. No mother could leave her kids forever.

  Except for Cassie and Coco’s mother, Marguerite Keneally, who’d had a family and a home and who’d packed her bags one day and had never returned.

  There were no photos of her in the house in Delaney Gardens where Pearl lived alone with her darling pug; no memories whatsoever. It was as if Pearl, who talked and laughed about everything, had done her best to remove Marguerite from her granddaughters’ memories because she thought the memory of a long-lost mother would break them. It was enough that their father had died permanently mourning his wife. Pearl had decided that Marguerite could do less damage if she were forgotten.

  In the office lift, Cassie tried to summon up her game face. Broken sleep seemed to be worse than no sleep at all. Shay and Beth had slept through it all. The double shot in her cappuccino might help and she hoped she’d get a few moments in the office to let her hair dry and let the caffeine sink in before the phone started.

  Larousse Events – ‘We Make Your Imagination a Reality’ – had a quarter of a floor to themselves in an office block in the financial district. One half was executive offices and an imposing reception that had been designed to look like the lobby of an expensive boutique hotel and which was beloved of the company boss and owner, Loren Larousse.

  ‘First impressions are vital,’ she intoned as the staff worked out how much the original art on the walls cost and wondered how the cost of it had affected Loren’s decision to cut bonuses that year.